Author and NPR Contributor Doug Fine on the Economic Future of Marijuana

The book Too High to Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution delves into a cannabis-based economic plan and its leaders, "ganjapreneurs." It chronicles the journey of a single flower from farm to patient in Mendocino County, California. Just north of the San Francisco Bay Area, the county has developed a system to legalize, regulate, and tax the growth of ganja. The zip-tie program, where plants wore yellow zip-ties bearing a permit number allowing them to be grown without legal repercussion, was formally shut down after pressure from the federal government at the end of the 2011 farming season.

Pot is an unregulated industry generating $35 billion dollars a year in unrecoupable, underground funds. A 2010 study from the Cato Institute in Washington claims that legalizing weed could generate tax revenue upward of $8.7 billion annually -- and would save the government roughly the same amount in enforcement spending. Over half of Americans support the legalization of marijuana, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center, and if Mendocino County is any indication, the federal government is starting to notice.

Fine, whose résumé includes backpacking across five continents, contributing to National Public Radio, and goat farming, comes to Changing Hands Bookstore on Friday, July 19, for a conversation about these numbers and their impact on Arizona. We caught up with him on his book tour to talk pot, the War on Drugs, and whether he's been known to "puff, puff, pass."

What was your process going into writing and researching Too High to Fail?
A retiring neighbor of mine got arrested for a very small amount of [marijuana] plants. There was a huge aerial raid that terrified me and my family, and it didn't seem like the Drug War was in sync with American ideals of freedom and civil liberties.

[But] I was conscious to write a book about not just why America is better off ending the Drug War, because 80 percent of Americans already know that. I chose to study this one program called the Zip-tie program in Mendocino County, California. I followed this one cannabis flower from farm to patient. It was a terrible success.

How did you come to that conclusion? What might a cannabis economy look like in that sense?
The model is just awesome! It's farmer-centric. In other words, it puts small farmers back to work in a way where they can support themselves. It mandates sustainable practices, it increases public safety, it creates local jobs -- not just on the farms but inspectors, flower trimmers, et cetera. And it was really win-win for everybody and something that can be replicated everywhere. They were even talking about later-stage, once the Drug War ends, using the unusable stocks to create ethanol and local energy.

Why a cannabis-based economy as opposed to something like narcotics or one incorporating all drugs? What makes pot different in terms of readiness for taxation?
Cannabis is considerably safer than alcohol and safer than America's real epidemic, which is prescription drug use -- and any cop will tell you that. The sheriff in Mendocino County doesn't even think cannabis is in the top 10 problems for the county.

Arizona is going to see a lot safer state with cannabis legalized, because the criminal cartels south of the border make the majority of their profits from cannabis. Use rates go down in every place that's legalized cannabis so far. There's even a study out of Rhode Island -- a university study -- that when medical cannabis got going there youth use rates went down as well, and that's due to the fact that criminals don't ask for ID. Legalizing actually decreases the rate of youth use, which I care about as a father. Banning it doesn't work. Now, I don't want to say anything has zero risk, but we can reduce 90 percent of our drug war spending and focus the rest on real education and treatments to prevent abuse. So, what I'm focusing on here is taxing and regulating responsible adult use. I still believe we should go after the really dangerous things like cocaine, meth and, really, prescription pills, too. [But] I think ending the war on cannabis really ends the Drug War.

We Recommend

Pot comprises almost 75% of the underground drug industry, that $35 BILLION a year industry. Should pot be removed from that underground economy, the entire illicit drug industry would collapse. It's take money to harvest, package, ship and market these drugs all under a system that employs far more people for security, transportation, farming and industrial production at a far greater cost than a legal industry. Take 75% out of the cash flow of the fast food industry and you could imagine what would happen - do it to the illicit drug trade and you won't be able to buy coke or heroin because the entire infrastructure would collapse. The drug lords would not be able to sustain such a business model without the ample cash that pot bring them.

The War on Drugs was the most costly, in terms money and lives, of ANY program run by the U.S. Government except WWII or the cold war. It's time to SHUT IT DOWN!

President Obama could do this by lowering the rating of pot from the Schedule of Controlled Substances just one step down tomorrow if he wanted to. Let's tell him to do it.

We got it already New Times! 400 friggin pro pot articles. We get it. Put a damn pot leaf behind the "NT" in your logo already and stop this constant pounding it down everyones throat while never directly saying it. Grow some balls already. Stop patronizing everyone with this pro pot stance while maintaining a teeny tiny bit of plausable deniablity. Its not very well veilled!